Mar 8 What We Do In Life....Amazon Echoes in Eternity

"Amazon has stopped fighting a legal battle to keep Echo recordings secret, after the defendant at the heart of the case gave his permission for the evidence to be handed over.

Arkansas resident James Bates was charged with the murder of a man found dead in his hot tub in November 2015.

Prosecutors used Bates’s “smart home” against him in course, citing information from a smart water meter to argue that someone was using a garden hose to clear blood off a patio.

They also attempted to force Amazon to hand over information gathered from Bates’s Echo smart speaker, arguing that it could have made recordings that would shed light on what happened that night. The Seattle-based tech company twice declined to provide the police with the information they requested from the device, although it did provide Bates’s account information and purchase history, court records showed.”